Roshydromet Weather Forecasting on SGI

February 9, 2009 by

Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring [Roshydromet] have procured a series of SGI machines in order to improve the precision of their weather forecasts. The 27TFlops of compute is 10,000 times more powerful than their previous platform. With the new compute, the forecast service plans to:

Generate more accurate forecasts

Extend the forecast duration from 5-7 days to 7-10 days

Offer a variety of new, “specialized” weather products based on the growing economic need

We map the globe in our models, with denser resolution from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait, Roshydromet forecasts weather in areas that include mountain ranges, steppes, forests and near desert,” said Vladimir Antsypovitch, director, Main Computer Center at Roshydromet. “With more detailed weather models, we can spare lives and communities from devastating weather threats. As the result of the selection procedure has shown, Silicon Graphics was the only vendor capable of delivering the performance, flexibility and reliability our applications require, along with the energy efficiency we needed to stay within our power constraints.”

The new compute and storage platform include a 1,664core Altix 4700 with 6.6TB of shared memory; a 1,408core Altix ICE with 2.8TB of distributed memory and 180TB of SGI RAID storage.

For more info on Roshydromet and their new purple supercomputers, read the full release here.

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